restrict
i have no time 2 make art now
i am only off friday
which is never enuf
to detox
the pipes get full
bits of sludge
clog the flow
so tiny books
now
express in torn images
my inside
i was raised reading ms magazine
i remember the burning of bras
as women demanded equality
in unison
beauty pageants
where women were paraded around
judged valuable or not
by old white men
it is always old white men
they added a talent portion
and gave away college degrees
they evolved—beauty pageants
and eventually—nearly faded away
for good
remember the seventies
a young girl in nyc
meets a pimp
he cons her into a life of illusion
she works for him
no fun—no fucking—no future
she is owned
when she sneaks out
to party the night away
he freaks
he roughs her up a bit
shames her in front of the others
teaches her to behave
for his own benefit
and just when we lost all hope
cagney and lacey showed up
they cuff the pimp
they free the girl
marybeth and christine
would never
be friends with a pimp
this is reality tv
like it or not
same same same
as vivi says
CHAPTER 11
Thank You for the Show
Florida. The state with the prettiest name. Star Island, where we live. My dream house, a reality now. Fragments of Streisand here and there, little notes she left for me, lying where she placed them. I smile whenever I see one. Miami is dazzling, the ocean emerald, a twinkle, as though whisked by some fairy’s wand. Heaven, I imagine looks like this. Inside the house is bright, bleached and clean. The patio with its lounge chairs and the pool looks like an ad in a magazine. The pool is heavenly blue, so clear I could see the silver drain warbling way down by the bottom.
We jumped in. We hugged our knees to our chests and leaped off the concrete edge, puncturing the water’s skin, hearing a shatter like glass, then liquid dreaming up all around us, enclosed in a primal, chlorinated bath where it was warm and safe. Lying, smeared with creamy sunblock, letting the rays have a go at us, our skin baking brown and sweet as the cinnamon toast I used to eat as a kid. Florida, an oasis, I jumped in and went down. I did the best I could. I tried to stay away from the TV, the Internet, just my kids and crafting. And it was lovely. But there was also something heavy in my gut, in the stomach that so disgusts Trump, the stomach that has been handed down to me by generations of Irish women; it is in my genes. My nana always had this flab of fat on her belly. It is what we are: our bodies.
I was hoping Barbara would call. I expected her to call, to reach out somehow, to explain, console, communicate goddamn it. Just communicate. She did not call. This meant—what else could it mean but guilt—a tacit acknowledgment that in some way, shape, or form she had said those words to Trump. Betrayal—the hardest thing to deal with for us humans.
I wanted to contact her. Would I get a response? I looked at my computer keypad, my phone keypad, my computer keypad, my phone keypad. I went to the pool, walked three times around, went back to the computer, typed in some words: “Dear Rosie; From Barbara,” erase. My friends. Who are they? Some are famous; some not. It wouldn’t matter. If any friend, be it Jackie or Madonna, had publicly said the things about me that she had, I would have phoned them. I would not have issued a press release. That’s what Barbara did. She issued a press release from her boat, in some sea: “. . . I do not regret for one moment my choice to hire Rosie O’Donnell as the moderator of The View.” The end. Not enough. In real life, not nearly enough.
Well, of course she didn’t regret hiring me. I had helped that show, a lot. What I had done to her private life, now that was a whole other matter. I shook up her society crowd—they were not happy—she doesn’t like controversy of any kind. Still, I expect more of my friends, and, if not my friends, women in general. I believe in simple sisterhood. I believe in a basic bond, unspoken yet understood, that exists among all women.
The world is comprised of clubs, and usually people belong to more than one. Walters—she was a feminist, she shattered the glass ceiling, she paved the way, she made the wake wide enough for me; we were in the club of women together. But she was also in the rich money club, the designer gowns and gilded mirrors and yachts in the Riviera club. And when the shit hit the golden fan, she tossed the women’s club aside and cast her allegiance with the wealthy guy. I don’t believe in that world. It has no value to me—at all. And this may be one reason why Trump was so enraged. Not only had I threatened his manhood—me, a degenerate, obese lesbian—to him this is unfathomable—but a woman like me had had the gall to criticize him, to claim he’d been bankrupt, to say he’d made his fortune from Papa, that pageants are innately misogynistic, that he is a pompous idiot. How dare I? As for Barbara, she had to choose. And when she did, the grand illusion, the movie in my mind, the possibility of sisterhood, of bonds that cannot be broken—that movie—ended there, Christmas week.
These are hard harsh judgments, I know. And judgments equally hard and harsh could be made of me. My hypocrisy, for instance, my constant criticism of fame and money and my unwillingness to give either up. My superwoman save-the-day narcissism that says it serves everyone but oftentimes serves mostly me. I know my flaws. I’m willing to admit them or hear them. Every flaw is an essential part of the prism. From one direction it’s a mistake. Tilt it to the right, though, let the sun shine on it now, and it glows with integrity.
Kelli and I took the kids out for dinner. There was a brand-new restaurant that had opened. Vivi was excited; she skipped down the street ahead of us, chanting “out to dinner.” This place had a sports bar feel to it, and there were TVs everywhere, everywhere. I didn’t want to see a TV. That was my only requirement of any restaurant. Spit in the food, burn the burgers; it’s all fine so long as you didn’t have a goddamn TV. The maitre d’ must have seen the look of horror on my face. He said, “I’ll take you upstairs.” So we went upstairs where there were far fewer customers, and only one TV, which was the size of the Great Wall of China, but going low. A sports channel was on. “Okay,” I thought, “we will be safe.”
Well, wouldn’t you know it, but then there we were; we popped up, Rosie vs. Trump. Our faces were huge, and the screen was split, me on one side, Donald on the other, and we were each blown up so big, with a ticker tape running underneath us, and, well you know what I’m going to say. Where, oh where, was the world? I just can’t get my mind around the fact that this is news. Why is this news on a sports channel?! I can only surmise people watch this stuff because it distracts them from knowing the real news, which is just too heavy to handle.
Anyway, Blake looked up at the screen. And he said, “You know what, Mom? Kyle said that you were going to get sued by some guy who has dump trucks and Kyle said the dump truck guy is going to take all your money.”
“No no no,” I said.
Vivi said, “If he takes all your money, we will beat him up!”
“Vivi,” I said, “we are not going to beat anyone up. Beating up is not nice. You don’t beat up people and he’s not going to take our money. He’s just being a bully. You know why, I teased him on TV, and he didn’t like it. He’s a rich kid and he is spoiled.”
“Like Malfoy?” Parker asked.
From Harry Potter. Exactly.
Parker said, “I heard he said the ‘f’ word about you!”
In our house, the “f” word is fat.
My children know their mama is fat, and that their mama feels bad about this, although I have tried, for their sake, not to hide who I am. They see. They know. In Florida my legs brown only up to my knees, my arms to my biceps. My face turns the color of toast, though, a nice healthy hue; I like my face okay. It feels somehow not connected to my body.
So that Christmas week, Trump was spewing on every talk show out there about how disgusting I was, such a slob, a pig. The result of which was everyone, whether they knew me or not, telling me I looked lovely. I never got so many compliments in my life than that week I was in Florida. People I didn’t know would come up to me and say, “Just so you know, we think you look great!” I’d be walking down the street in Miami and little old ladies would come up to me and touch my cheeks and say, “Honey, you look good,” or “Sweetheart, you know you’re gorgeous.” It touched me, the fundamental urge people have to salve someone who is wounded. It was an urge exactly the opposite of Trump’s, which was to attack. “You’re beautiful,” people kept saying. “Beautiful.” Abundant kindness.
But sometimes there is nothing anyone can do or say that will penetrate the leaden ball sitting in the stomach. It was there. I tried as best I could to be with my kids, because this was my time, a stretch of time, a rare occurrence. I tried. But the heaviness, the anger, I often needed to retreat from. My children wanted to know why Mama was in the craft room so much.
I was in there gluing things together. The glue felt good. I liked the tacky feeling on my fingers. I liked to press the pads of my coated fingertips together, wait a moment, and then pry them apart, watch the half-dried Elmer’s stretch its clear coating before snapping in half. I glued boxes inside boxes inside boxes, a world collapsing to a cube so small it could barely be measured; that’s what I was making. I glued plastic fighting figures, soldiers on a ledge with a flag draped behind them, the red not stripes but scrawl, the stars van Gogh-ish, hypnotic hysterical swirls of silver and white. I could not stop gluing. I used Elmer’s and Mod Podge and Krazy Glue. I glued a block to the ceiling, standing on a step stool for the requisite half hour, giving the glue time to dry. It was the embodiment of how I felt. Precarious. Dangerous. About to fall. But not.
It was January now, back East the days gray, the trees stark and nude, but in Florida every day was a soft balmy blue. Why could I not feel it, appreciate it? This hurt me, the fact that I could not be hurt, that somewhere inside I was numbed out and automatic. And despite the distance between me and Barbara, she on her yacht on the other side of some sea, and then back in Manhattan ready to resume her seat on the show, while I was here, “vacationing” with my brood, despite the distance I felt in some weird way like Barbara was with me, almost literally on my mind. I swam in the pool. I carried on long elaborate conversations with Barbara; I told her about my childhood; we talked politics; I explained to her how much it hurt, her carefully crafted truce attempts, her palm not out in the form of giftgiving, but up, like a policeman, his white glove a blank mute stop. Stop! What would have stopped it for me was her start, her offer to step to my side, sisterhood, the mutual need to preserve and protect. For some reason, as I swam, or walked, or sang my kids to sleep, I kept recalling a dinner we had well before The View started. So it must have been—what—that summer before September 5, or even earlier, in the spring. Barbara asked Kelli and me out to dinner, this while the contract negotiations were probably going on, and we went. Of course we went. Kelli looked as Kelli always does look, simply, cleanly, casually elegant. Here’s the thing. Usually I care not a whit about clothes. I dress the way I need to, and when I don’t need to, I dress in whatever’s comfortable. But that night, getting ready to dine with Barbara, I thought about what to wear. I stood in front of my closet and fingered the pants, the cotton shirts. I wanted to look right for Barbara, and what would that mean? A sequined gown, a high-end suit? No. Not me. At all. In the end I chose khakis and J. Jill clogs. I chose clothes that at once reflected who I was but that would also appeal to her aesthetic: tailored; tasteful. From the very beginning, I think, I have wanted to both be who I am and who she wanted me to be.
Why am I so young, even as I age?
What was I doing on January 3, 2007, at 11 a.m. eastern standard time? I don’t know. I was definitely not watching the television; that much I know, because the last thing I wanted during my vacation was more media. Maybe I was taking a walk with Vivi. Maybe I was in our boat, in the Floridian bay, looking for seahorses with Blake. Blake is the most magical of my children; everywhere he goes he finds unlikely objects: a copper key, a tiny crystal car, a perfectly preserved sand dollar. Lately he had been interested in seahorses, searching for them everywhere, and I went with him. I looked up seahorses on Google; maybe I was doing that on January 3, 2007, at 11 a.m. eastern standard time, typing the word seahorse into the search box and seeing scroll down my screen the mythical miniature beast with its curved blade of a body. Seahorses, I read, that day or sometime soon thereafter, seahorses are some of the animal kingdom’s most venerable males. After the females lay their eggs, the fathers take them into their mouths, gestating them there for the time it takes, holding their young in their soft sealed maws until they hatch. I wasn’t sure of that fact; didn’t the males hold the eggs in pouches? Hadn’t I learned that somewhere? It didn’t matter right then, what mattered to me was the image of females roaming free in the ocean while the males toil for the newborns, gently spitting them into the sea once they hatch, so they are cradled in the waves. I like seahorses. They make Homo-sapien males, like Trump, at the least less inevitable. If men were like seahorses, maybe Barbara and I, maybe all women, would not have such tangled, tough relationships.
So, let’s say I was reading about seahorses that day, that time, January 3, Barbara now back from vacation and taking her seat at the table again. I did not see the show and I’m glad for that, because I’m not sure what I would have done had I witnessed her essentially communicating with me through the camera, in public, choosing to explain to me her thoughts, her position, her sentiments, with such a broad brush. What I wanted was what any sane person would have wanted: an intimate heart-to-heart, but Barbara doesn’t do intimacy. I do, or at least I try, although it’s true I fail over three quarters of the time. But one thing’s for sure: even with all my interpersonal faults, I would not use the television to attempt conflict resolution with a friend or a colleague.
Which is what she did. Instead of speaking with me on the phone, or writing me a long letter, she went on air, January 3rd, 11 a.m., and, from what I later heard, said blah dedidi dah dedididah. Supposedly she read a carefully crafted statement all strategy, no heart. “. . . clearing things up . . . Donald Trump . . . not happy with my decision . . . the truth . . . never regretted . . . hiring . . . clearing things up . . . truth . . . clearing things up . . .”
Nothing. It clarified nothing for me. If anything it made it worse. Because, like I said, my way of doing dialogue, of negotiating relationships, of working through fights, is not to address the person in question on the tube. But that’s how Barbara does it. That’s how she’s done it her whole life. Think of that. Practically her whole life on air. Way up high, in the thinness. What a wingspan! But how hard it is to breathe.
“Write to her,” Kelli said once we’d heard what she’d said. “Don’t tell her you didn’t watch it,” Kelli said. “Just write to her and say, ‘Thank you for the show today. Let’s put this behind us and start the New Year. Rosie.’”
I tried. I typed it out. I kept staring at the screen. New Year. Rosie. Thank you for the show.
Thank you for the show.
Five simple words, every one a single syllable. Those words kept clacking in my head. Thank you for the show. I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t send it. Stuck.
I was due back on The View January 8. So I had five more days left with my family. I tried to put all problems out of my head. We went out on our boat; we barbecued. W
e played Scrabble. We loved each other. The kids played with their Christmas presents and fought endlessly about Blake’s electric car, a miniature automobile that he could race around the driveway in, vroom, around he went, in circles, over and over again, hour after hour. What he was doing on the outside was what was happening in my head on the inside, around and around, electricity crackling, the synapses sparking, even though it was over. I knew it was not. For betrayal is deep. It is the fish flailing and it can’t get air. It’s epic, movie-esque. It is primitive and painful in a way that defies words. Time does not always heal. With time it got worse, not Donald, but Barbara, and the hurt, and the rage, five-fingered, fisted, too hot to touch.
Blake circled madly in his brand-new car; he would not stop. “Enough!” I screamed at him one afternoon. He stopped abruptly, pressed the pedal, and came screeching to a halt. He looked up at me, confused. “What?” he said. How could I explain that I wasn’t yelling at him? I was yelling at me. “Sorry, dude,” I said, touching his head. “Brain fart,” I said. He threw back his head and laughed. And I saw a look on his face I have captured a thousand times in his seven years on earth. It stills my soul. Smiling. He sped away.
She betrayed me in many ways, my mother. First off, she died. Disappeared like a Copperfield trick. For years I lived in a dream, waiting to wake. She just up and left, and didn’t give me directions as to how to find her. I looked for years. I am still looking. Lauren Slater shares the same birthday with me. I have many similarities with Slater, so when we discovered we shared the same birthday, it was weird. “What time were you born?” she asked. As if I would know. I do not know. I never have. I doubt I ever will.
She was vibrant, my mother was. She was size ten, I think, rough around the edges, pretty pleasant/ peasant-looking. She had a loud voice and a huge humor to hide her too huge heart. She could make you laugh, Roseann O’Donnell, and she did make you laugh. Schoolteachers at Rolling Hills Elementary School, Commack, Long Island, will tell you this. I still know them now. Miss Boy, Miss Leiner—young, smart, feminist women, they were maybe twenty-one, my mother thirty-five or thirty-six. She would have them doubled over laughing in the hallway. My mom was a star; really, she was.
Celebrity Detox Page 11